Boot takes forever

[AlexT]

I am trying to boot the Live CD and it takes about 45 minutes to get the first screen.
I then double clicked INSTALL and, although there is a lot of CD activity, it still hasn't changed the initial screen. I have been waiting for approx. 2 hours.

My HDD is empty, (no partitions created)

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Alex

[miket]

Hi Alex ...

I am trying to boot the Live CD and it takes about 45 minutes to get the first screen.
I then double clicked INSTALL and, although there is a lot of CD activity, it still hasn't changed the initial screen. I have been waiting for approx. 2 hours.
My HDD is empty, (no partitions created)
Any ideas?
Cheers,
Alex

I have experienced this myself !
I eventually tracked it down to a bad CDROM drive ... it was having to re-read the install CD over and over until it got a good read ....
I changed the drive and it worked perfectly ....

I have also seen the same problem with a bad CDROM disc .... although it was nowhere near as bad ... re-making the CD using a better quality disc also resolved the issue ...

Hope this helps !

Mike.

[Guest]

Thanks Mike, I will change the CD drive and try again.

When I downloaded the ISO I burnt it at the lowest possible speed and then checked the MD5 checksum. All seemed OK.

I'll let you know the result of the CD drive change.

Cheers,
Alex

[Guest]

Mike,
I added a second CD drive and tried again - so far it is the same and I am waiting for the boot sequence to finish. The initial screen is displayed but pointer movement via the mouse is very sporadic. Lots of CD activity.

One thing that I omitted to mention was that I get an error message pop-up whith tells me that
"There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon."..."Did not receive a reply:"

I'm not sure what this means

[miket]

Hi,

Mike,
I added a second CD drive and tried again - so far it is the same and I am waiting for the boot sequence to finish. The initial screen is displayed but pointer movement via the mouse is very sporadic. Lots of CD activity.

One thing that I omitted to mention was that I get an error message pop-up whith tells me that
"There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon."..."Did not receive a reply:"

I'm not sure what this means

What is the spec of the machine you are trying to install Mint onto ?
Also, what is the spec of the CDROM Drive, Single speed, double speed, 18x ??

Mike.

[Guest]

Mike,

The PC is an HP Vectra VL 400, (Pentium III), with 256Mb RAM and an 8Mb HDD (empty)

As for the CD drives, I have no indication of their speeds. the original one is the Vectra installed drive and the new one is from an old server.

This system used to run Linux Mint Bea sucessfully.

Cheers,
Alex

[miket]

Hi Alex,

Mike,

The PC is an HP Vectra VL 400, (Pentium III), with 256Mb RAM and an 8Mb HDD (empty)
As for the CD drives, I have no indication of their speeds. the original one is the Vectra installed drive and the new one is from an old server.
This system used to run Linux Mint Bea sucessfully.
Cheers,
Alex

This machine is very under-powered for Mint 5 ... I doubt you will get it to install at all ....
256MB RAM is probably not going to be enough ... it will be swapping like crazy

I'm not even sure that Mint 4 will install on it ? Might be worth trying ... but don't be surprised if it has the same problems ...
If you want to run Mint I'd suggest you go back to Bea .....

Mike.

[Guest]

Mike,
Thanks for the quick replies: much appreciated.

I was thinking along the same lines with such a small machine. I'll have a look and see if there is a later version of Bea.

Thanks again,
Alex

[eStyleS]

The PC is an HP Vectra VL 400, (Pentium III), with 256Mb RAM and an 8Mb HDD (empty)

As for the CD drives, I have no indication of their speeds. the original one is the Vectra installed drive and the new one is from an old server.

This system used to run Linux Mint Bea sucessfully.

I doubt you'll be able to install anything on an 8MB HDD. The smallest HD I've ever personally used was 40MB, although it was considered pretty big at the time we bought it. =) Assuming that's 8GB.

Something that old, I would think it would run better with a more light-weight distro than Mint. Maybe Fluxbuntu - I haven't tried it yet, but considering it's a *buntu, it should be pretty similar to Mint - I just wonder how the Fluxbox windows manager is...